Working Paper No. 10-56:
The Law Firm and the League: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, Major League Baseball and MLB.com

Author(s):

Abstract:

This
is (roughly) the 10th anniversary of the transfer of a unique and valuable
baseball property. On September 6, 2000, Major League Baseball and Morgan,
Lewis & Bockius LLP (a very big and very prominent Philadelphia-based
international law firm) issued a joint press release announcing “that the law
firm has transferred its domain name — mlb.com — to Major League Baseball.”
From today’s perspective in the current age of the Internet, looking back at a
time when the rise of that age (or at least its angle of ascent) was not at all
clear, it seems like a bizarrely fortuitous set of coincidences:

• In
1994, the initials of big-time baseball (Major League Baseball = MLB) and the
initials of one of big-time baseball’s longtime, big-time outside law firms
(Morgan, Lewis & Bockius = MLB) were the same (and still are); and

• In
1994, it was the law firm that had the foresight, or luck, to move relatively
early to register the mlb.com Internet domain name.

And
then . . .

• Several
years later, in 2000, when Major League Baseball started to aggressively market
itself on the Internet, Morgan Lewis & Bockius was, for a variety of
reasons described below, willing to part with mlb.com for a song, or perhaps
even less.

At
the time of its consummation, the mlb.com transaction got a lot of attention in
the news media, as well it might. Because by 2000, it was obvious that the
Internet was big business, and transactions in Internet domain names were
sufficiently common and significant to inspire government regulation of that
market. But even in the new and booming and volatile domain-name market, the
mlb.com deal qualified as unusual in at least two respects. The deal also
illustrates the difficulty of placing a value on a favor, at least between
lawyer and client, in the context of the business of baseball.